How to add the Facebook social connector to Office 2010

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Microsoft has just announced that it’s added Facebook and Windows Live to the Outlook Social Connector, but it’s not entirely obvious how you access it. So here’s a quick step-by-step guide that tells you everything you need to know.

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How to install free country maps on your Nokia phone

Friday, June 18th, 2010

The current issue of PC Pro includes a road test of satnav devices – from a standalone device produced by TomTom to the freebies that come with new Nokia phones and Android mobiles. (If you’re based in the UK, you’ll be able to buy the issue until Wednesday 14 July.)

However, during our research for that feature we endured almost an hour of hitting brick walls when attempting to download maps directly to a Nokia phone. And that’s a real shame, as Nokia has one of the more interesting pieces of satnav software, and it generously provides free maps for every country we can think of.

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Adding video to your website with HTML5

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

In the first of his blogs for PC Pro, web developer Ian Devlin reveals how to embed video into your website with HTML5

Probably the biggest and most talked about feature of HTML5 is embedded video. Currently, the only method of adding video content to your website is with a third-party plugin such as Flash, QuickTime or RealPlayer. With the dawn of HTML5 and the video element this will all change, with video support being handled by the web browser, doing away with the need for any third party support.

Several web browsers already offer support for HTML5. Here we’re going to reveal how you can embed plugin-free video into your site and the issues you’ll face.

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How to reach home: volcano rules for remote connections

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

The cruellest game to play in Disaster Recovery is hindsight. If you had carefully crafted your business continuity plan to accommodate attacks on Manhattan, then the London attacks – in which the cellphone networks were shut down for hours at a time – would have made a prize mess of your notion to alert staff to BC decisions by text message.

Then you accommodate that problem, and the next disaster is a suicide ram-raid at Glasgow Airport. So you factor that issue in… only to find that the next problem is a volcano. Of all the words I never expected to type in a PC Pro blog, “Volcano” is a favourite – and I’m not even going to make a Bjork of myself trying to spell the name of the red hot steam-filled sulphurous hole in question.

However; as Tim Danton has pointed out more than once, I have some relevant experience to offer, because I have been banging around Europe – mostly by car – for the past decade. If you are trying to get critical workers online from unfamiliar locations and methods, here’s the benefit of a few attempts to do the wrong thing the right way, from foreign fields.

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Video blogging: how to get started

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Promoting your business using multimedia  is becoming increasingly popular as the line between TV and the internet continues to blur, so I decided to dip my toes in the shark-infested waters of video blogging.

Given that I didn’t know how I’d take to it, I wanted to invest as little time and money in finding out. Here’s how I did it…
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How to change the default template in Word 2007

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

After more than two years with Word 2007 I’ve finally snapped. No, Microsoft, when I create a new document I don’t want to use the Calibri font, I don’t want huge margins and I absolutely, positively NEVER want an extra break after every paragraph. It’s not how I format my documents, and it never will be.

So today I did what I should have done a long time ago: I fixed the default template. Having cursed it for more than two years I’m almost embarrassed at how easy it was. (more…)

How to switch off Google Buzz

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Google Buzz has hardly taken the world by storm. Twitter, blogs and tech sites are swelling with complaints over its privacy and, in particular, its irritating habit of clogging up previously spam-free  Gmail inboxes with its constant alerts.

I’m going to battle on for a few more days before I deliver my verdict on Buzz. But several people have already emailed/Tweeted us to ask how to turn Buzz off.

The answer is simple but relatively well hidden.  Drop down to the foot of the Gmail page and you’ll find a tiny link marked “turn off Buzz”.

If you need any further instruction, you really shouldn’t be using the computer without adult supervision.

How to switch off Virgin Media’s mobile broadband image compression

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Recently, I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in the company of 3G dongles for our “Mobile Broadband Con” feature, which will be hitting the shelves on 11 February.

One of the aforementioned cons of mobile broadband is image compression – a process where the networks water down the images on websites to conserve bandwidth. The end result is that sites such as the BBC homepage look as if they’ve been dipped in the bath, and in my experience, the compression barely saves any time at all on page downloads.

Many networks allow you to switch the compression off if you wish. Virgin Media doesn’t, on the rather dubious premise that it’s helping customers stay within their data download limits.

However, there is a sneaky way to beat the Virgin image washout, which I accidentally stumbled across during my tests. Virgin piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, and if you download T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Accelerator software, you’ll find that it can be used to adjust the compression on Virgin, too.

How to add week numbers in Microsoft Outlook 2010

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

I didn’t realise until recently that week numbers are a bit of a European obsession, which is why US-created software such as Microsoft Office tends to ignore them.

You had to jump through three or four hoops in Office 2003 and Office 2007 to add them (clicking Tools | Options | Calendar Options and then tickboxing “Show week numbers in the Month View and Date Navigator”), but fortunately Outlook 2010 makes it much easier.

Or at least, easier to explain. So, here are the three steps you need to add week numbers in Outlook 2010.

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How to keep on top of email

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I admit that I’m a little obsessed by email. Not only have I previously blogged on how I use Outlook, I also wrote a feature on How to Master Outlook for PC Pro last year and interviewed the man behind Getting Things Done, David Allen.

Now David Allen is a man I admire greatly, and I’m sure there are thousands of people who have converted to his way of doing things with huge success. But he advocates a “system”, a complete change in your habits, and the brutal reality is that most people can’t change their ways. And that includes me.

Instead, I seem to have arrived at a way of doing things that can be best thought of as a kludge. It doesn’t always work and it has its faults. Sometimes I drown in so much email that I want to scream, and sometimes I forget things. But in my mind it’s a 20% of the effort with 80% of the result kind of approach, so for better or worse I share it here.

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